Darrell Martin wrote:
> P.S. The sort date exists for exactly one purpose, and that is to
> order Tags. It is a date at all *only* because that is the most
> obvious and convenient way to set the value by default, that results
> in the desired order the great majority of the time.

Darrell,

Just to amplify your point where no amplification* is necessary <g>...

Using a date to define the sequence of tags has an essential quality that the other obvious solutions do not have: dates have meaning independent of people. Specifically, if tag order was determined by a sequence number, how would the user, or the program for that matter, set the proper sequence number when an event is shared by multiple people? I suspect there are solutions to that problem, but if the solution takes more than a sentence to explain, it's more complex than using a sort date. People inherently understand the sequence of dates and dates from one person are relative to the same origin as dates for another person or persons.

I can imagine circumstances where it would be difficult or tedious to set a good sort date. For example, given a tag shared by a set of people, the best sort date for person "A" might be one day earlier than the best sort date for person "B". A solution in that case might be subject to a ripple effect, and include adjusting the sort date in multiple events for all the people involved. That's the theory, but in practice, that situation has never arisen in my TMG data where I had to adjust more than a single sort date.